The Ninety-Five Theses, formally Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum, are I would guess little read today. Nevertheless they are one of the most important documents in European history, defining and dividing an era and profoundly influencing the subsequent course of events, even to the present day.

The soil was ripe for their effects. Although the Catholic Church had held religious sway in much of Europe for over a thousand years, snuffing out any challenges to its authority with vicious ruthlessness and brutality, it had long been monstrously corrupt, power and wealth rather than the salvation of souls and the care of its flock its chief preoccupations. The ideas of the Renaissance now permeating Europe opened minds to the Church’s failings and exposed its doctrines to intellectual question, while the growth of literacy and the invention of the printing press increased Scriptural knowledge and quickened people’s desire to interpret the teachings of Christ for themselves, rather than be spoon-fed the Church’s version.

Unless the Church reformed itself, which it was never going to voluntarily do, another figure such as Wycliffe, in many ways the spiritual father of the Reformation, or Hus was bound to arise and challenge the Church once more, and it had never been in a weaker position to withstand a determined intellectual assault. That figure was Martin Luther, a man who can be criticised but whose integrity, courage, intellect and charisma cannot be doubted.

Winning many of the German princes to his side, he ended up breaking half Europe away from the Catholic Church’s millennium-long dominion. The Church did at last reform itself, to an extent, then marshalled those rulers who remained loyal to it and launched the Counter-Reformation. At the cost of uncounted lives, some lost ground was regained. More ground, though, proved lost for ever, and by far the greater part of Northern Europe remains Protestant to this day.

And it all began with the nailing of some pieces of paper to a church door. The sovereigns of the day all played a part in these events, whether they were at the heart of them or on the periphery. The first four in the list not so much; the Emperor Maximilian I died in 1519, leaving his grandson and successor Karl V to struggle lifelong and ultimately unsuccessfully against the spread of the new ideas. Manuel the Fortunate was fortunate among other things in reigning in far-away Portugal, where the Reformation never took much hold. His chief religious difficulties were with his parents-in-law, the Catholic Kings of Spain, and their pressure on him to persecute Jews, which he was most unwilling to do.

Finally he had all the Jews in his kingdom forcibly baptised, then declared that since there were now no Jews left in Portugal the issue of what to do about them was moot. A nod and a wink to the new ‘converts’ let them know that they could continue to practice their religion peacefully, so long as it was privately.

His sister-in-law Juana I of Spain was not concerned with events at all, though this was far from due to good fortune. She had been locked up as insane, a highly questionable diagnosis, and her powers were exercised on her behalf by others. Vasily III in Orthodox Moscow did have religious problems, but they were to do with the Catholic roots of his unpopular second wife rather than any reform movement.

In Poland, Zygmunt the Old tolerated the reformers, though unswayed by them, and the movement flourished there for much of the century. Eventually Poland became the greatest triumph of the Counter-Reformation, achieved what is more without persecution and violence. Something people do not always realise is that Henry VIII of England remained a lifelong implacable foe of the reformed faith, even after his own breach with Rome. He did not become a Protestant, he burned Protestants, right to the last year of his reign.

His sixth wife, Catherine Parr, was (correctly) suspected by Henry to be a secret Protestant, and matters got to the stage of his ordering her arrest and trial. Trials in Henrician England only had one outcome, and the mnemonic ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived’ would doubtless have instead ended ‘divorced, beheaded, fried’ had Catherine not been able to convince her husband that he was mistaken, and her beliefs in every way accorded with his, as those of a dutiful and subservient wife should.

He nevertheless did break with Rome, and though it was not on grounds of reform it is hard to imagine that he could have done it except against the background of the reform movement. The reign of his son Edward VI moved the country decisively towards Protestantism, and after his daughter Mary I’s blood-soaked strivings to turn back the clock his second daughter Elizabeth I established the Church of England order that remains to this day.

Christian II was a strange man, and ruler. His affection and concern for the common people was admirable, his brutality and injustice towards the aristocracy, whom he decimated in Sweden during his short reign there and treated with despotic cruelty in Denmark, was not only less than admirable but also most unwise. He forgot that while the common people were more numerous the aristocracy were far more powerful, and lost the thrones of first Sweden and then Denmark and Norway.

While reigning he had attempted to crush the nascent reform movement in Denmark, but in exile became a Lutheran himself. He then went back to Catholicism in order to gain the support of Danish Catholics for a bid for restoration. The outcome was defeat and imprisonment, in quite comfortable circumstances, for the remainder of his life.

The Kirk was to be the bane of the next two Scottish monarchs, but this was not for want of effort on James V’s part to strangle it at birth. Personally a cultured man, attractive and charming and a dutiful monarch, he used the utmost cruelty against proponents of reform, with a number of heresy burnings taking place in his reign. If the reign had continued then perhaps he would have prevented Protestantism from taking root in Scotland, but the Scottish pattern was one of long minorities and short adult reigns, and James V followed it, more or less (technically his minority was for eleven years and his adult reign sixteen, but that is only because he was declared an adult aged twelve – it may be doubted whether he actually rather than nominally ruled for several years after that).

The regents for his infant daughter Mary I, first the heir presumptive the Earl of Arran and then James’s widow, and Mary’s mother, Marie of Guise, proved less determined. Under French influence Marie did in the later part of her regency attempt to move against the reformers, but her death removed the last obstacle to Scotland becoming the firmly Protestant realm it remained until large-scale immigration from Ireland in the 19th century swelled the Catholic minority, and created the religious tensions and divisions which bedevil the country to this day.

Likewise cultured and scholarly, François I had the grander stage of France to disport himself on, and was perhaps the most notable monarchical patron of arts, literature and architecture of the age. But while entirely sympathetic to the ideals of the Renaissance, he found those of the Reformation more than a step too far. It was not so at first; always pragmatic (he was the first major sovereign to formally ally with Ottoman Turkey, to the horror of his contemporaries who called it ‘the impious alliance’), he saw the religious fault lines appearing in Germany as weakening his deadly foe the Emperor Karl V, and was influenced too by his sister Marguerite, Queen Consort of Navarre and a woman who combined profound intellect and great scholarship with charm and grace and genuine goodness. All who met her seemed to love her, a royal cult figure like Queen Louise of Prussia many generations later, and her brother was as much under her spell as anyone else.

But not so much so that her leanings towards the reformers were able to prevent him from eventually launching the most violent and brutal assault yet upon the followers of the new faith, ending with many thousands dead and many more than that fled. However, this savagery, and that of François’ son and successor Henri II, failed to wipe out French Protestantism, or come near to it, and the reigns of Henri II’s sons were wracked by wars of religion, ending in an uneasy compromise giving Protestants official status and toleration. Until, that is, Louis XIV finally succeeded where François and Henri had failed and eradicated Protestantism, and Protestants, from France.

The reformed religion was not among the main problems facing Lajos II in his brief adult reign. Under the influence of his guardian Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (Georg, a wholly admirable man, was as significant a figure as Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast and Philip the Magnanimous among the German princes guarding and guiding the Reformation, though not nearly so well-known today as they are), Lajos was indeed personally sympathetic to it. His troubles were firstly his own financial incontinence, and secondly the ever-growing Ottoman threat. He and most of the Hungarian army died confronting the latter on the field of Mohács, and the Sultan then proceeded to take all but a rump of Hungary into his dominions. By the time the Habsburgs had completed the patient process of reconquest, the Reformation was an established fact of history and turmoil largely at an end.

In Bohemia, Lajos’s other kingdom, his immediate successor Ferdinand I did his best to promote the Counter-Reformation by peaceful means, and this policy continued without overmuch success until Ferdinand’s Jesuit-influenced grandson Ferdinand II tried violence instead, succeeding in launching the Thirty Years War but also in virtually eradicating the reformed faith in Bohemia.

Henri II of Navarre was a monarch somewhat overshadowed by the brilliance of his consort Marguerite, discussed above as the sister of François I. They were however a devoted and well-suited couple, and he like her was more than sympathetic to Reformation ideals, which his daughter and heiress Jeanne III did much to promote in France, of which Navarre was in many ways a semi-detached part.

I was happy when it originally proved possible to post just a single chart covering the relationships of these monarchs; as with the obvious exception of Vasily III they were naturally all Catholic, there was no obvious split. I was correspondingly dismayed when on adding all the additional red links made possible by the new version of the Genealogics relationships calculator the chart proved to be 5,000 characters over the limit. I nevertheless managed to keep the chart in one piece, by resorting to a somewhat desperate expedient which is explained below it. Not ideal, but better than the alternative, which would have entailed reposting virtually the entire thread and produced an even less satisfactory result.

There is again a table rather than summary of statistics to follow the chart and its key, in which it is interesting to note that despite all the talk of Catholic and Protestant in this introduction the leading ancestor was not even Christian. I will have more to say on this when we get to the last of the charts, those for 1453. While the note on posterities with which I will conclude the thread will again not be so long as this introduction it will be long enough, as I have some remarks to make about the ancestries of some of these sovereigns, as well as the effect on the spread of posterities of those pieces of paper Martin Luther fixed to the doors of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg one All Hallows' Eve.

In order to keep this chart within forum size limits and avoid it having to be split, the second instance of each red link has been removed. That is, the relationships of sovereigns have a red link only when the other sovereign is below them on the left. All relationships are linked still, just only one of the two occurrences of each, and if you go to the intersection of the column of the sovereign below and row of the sovereign above you will find a link there. As a link is available for all relationships they are all in red, though those not directly linked are not underlined. The two relationships that are linked twice are uncle/nephew relationships, and you will see why if you click each of a pair.

The quick overview is that Maximilian I, Juana I, and Zygmunt I are ancestors of all ten European sovereigns currently reigning. James V is of nine of them, the exception being as usual the Prince of Monaco.* Christian II is of the Catholics, Albert II aside, and also of the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian monarchs.† Manoel I, François I and Henri II are ancestors of the Catholics only, with the inevitable exception. Vasily III, Henry VIII and Lajos II have no known surviving posterity; there is a claim that posterity survives from an illegitimate son of Lajos II, and similarly from an illegitimate son and daughter of Henry VIII, but the former does not seem to be universally accepted and I see little evidence for the latter.±

Even from this quick overview the amazing fact can be seen that the effects of the religious divide are already apparent in the posterities of these, the sovereigns at the very dawn of the Reformation. Effectively instantaneously two royal clans were created, both endogamous, though the Catholic one far more strictly so (in the sense that they hardly ever married their daughters ‘out’ and so spread Catholic descents, while the Protestants seemed on the whole more willing to marry their daughters to Catholics; conversions also played a part in such mixing as took place).

This is all discussed further in threads for later years, but it seemed important to note that the phenomenon occurred literally the instant it possibly could. Turning to those monarchs without posterities, Vasily III did originally have one, of course, but in part due to the murderous paranoia of his son Ivan IV it failed. There are important and interesting descents he had that survive through collateral lines, but I will cover these in the thread for 1453.

There is ample descent surviving from Henry VIII’s full sisters Margaret and Mary. For the former it includes all currently reigning sovereigns except Albert II, for the latter the Queen and, as explained in the next post, Albert II only; she is in fact the first sovereign ever to be descended from both sisters. Lajos II’s sister Anna was the wife of the Emperor Ferdinand I, and all current sovereigns descend from them both.

The last part of this note is concerned with another collateral descent, via Jeanne d’Angoulême, one of several children François I’s father Charles, Count of Angoulême had other than with his wife. I was excited to find that through her granddaughter, Charlotte de Bourbon, the most prolific of William the Silent’s numerous wives, Jeanne was an ancestress of all current sovereigns, with the possible exception of the Prince of Monaco.§ The reason for the excitement was that this meant I could extend the applicability of something I had intended anyway to include in the note to more than just the royal descendants today of François I. However, the discovery led me into considerable complications, as I had gone off rather half-cocked, and I ended up wishing I had never heard of the woman. The complications are explained in the fourth and fifth footnotes below, but first let's have the story which was the whole point of the exercise.

When rooting around in ancestries sometimes a name keeps catching your eye and eventually you just have to stop what you are doing and find out who he or she was. In this case it was Olivier V de Clisson, whom I first noticed in the ancestry of Henri II of Navarre. He turned out to be a Breton nobleman of considerable importance and fame, but it was the story of his mother Jeanne, ‘the Lioness of Brittany’, that really caught my imagination.

Her husband Olivier IV, to whom she was devoted, was she considered unjustly executed at the order of Philippe VI of France. Vowing vengeance, she sold her lands and reportedly her body to raise funds for a pirate fleet, with which she terrorised French shipping in the Channel for years to come. With black hulls and red sails, her fleet descended on ship after ship, seizing them and slaughtering all on board, except two or three she would leave alive to report to Philippe that Jeanne’s thirst for vengeance was not yet slaked. This pirate queen was the unlikely ancestress of François I also, and since that was through his father she was ancestress too to his half-sister Jeanne (who presumably was not named in her honour).

And there is more. Through the same line comes a descent from Jeanne de Flandre, wife of Jean IV and mother of Jean V, Dukes of Brittany.** The Breton ducal throne was in dispute at the time, and when Jean IV was taken prisoner (again by Philippe VI, who had invited him to talks under a pledge of safe conduct, which he promptly violated) Jeanne took up arms to defend his interests and those of their young son, literally putting on armour and leading troops in battle. Her courage and leadership played no small part in securing her husband’s release, but then things went awry; her husband died, and she was forced to flee to England with her son and daughter.

Unlike that of her pirate namesake (who eventually gave up pillage and slaughter for years of peaceful rural retirement) her story did not have a happy ending, she becoming insane and spending her last years in confinement. Her son however when grown returned to Brittany and, with English aid, triumphed over his foes and secured the duchy for himself and his heirs, which if she could have known it would have made Jeanne very happy.

I don’t know whether people will agree, but I believed (and still do, despite all the embarrassment they indirectly caused me) that the stories of these remarkable predecessors of a third Jeanne, Jeanne d’Arc, each an ancestress (as it turned out) of all ten present-day sovereigns, were well worth a digression to end the note with.

* In case anyone wonders, I did look for descents from James’s large brood of illegitimate children in Albert II’s Scottish aristocratic ancestry, but to my surprise found none.† His blood first returned (stage 1:stage 2: stage 3) to the Swedish and Norwegian thrones with Carl XV in 1859, and the Danish (stage 4) with Christian X in 1912.± The individuals in question are Henry Carey, 1st Baron Hunsdon (an important patron of Shakespeare) and his elder sister Catherine. Their mother was Mary Boleyn, herself sister of the more famous Anne and wife of the courtier William Carey. Mary is alleged to have had an affair with the King over several years of her marriage, covering the period when her children were conceived. Nothing especially unlikely in that, but the affair if it happened was conducted very discreetly indeed and evidence for it seems to me to be slight tending towards non-existent.Evidence from portraiture doesn't help a lot. Henry bore no especial resemblance to his namesake the King, but a picture thought to be of Catherine does show a marked likeness. But so do portraits of William Carey! He was the King's third cousin, and while it might seem unlikely that there would be a family resemblance from a relationship that distant, if you think about it their grandmothers were first cousins. What is unlikely about first cousins resembling each other, or grandchildren resembling a grandparent? In any case the resemblance between courtier and King unquestionably existed, so portraiture can prove nothing.The clincher for me is not so much the King's failure to acknowledge his alleged children; although he did (despite what you may read) swiftly acknowledge his one undoubted illegitimate child, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the latter's mother was an unmarried lady. Mary Boleyn was very much married, and to a key courtier and confidant of the King's. Open acknowledgement of Henry cuckolding his trusted servant would have been out of the question. No, it is the attitude of Elizabeth I to her first cousins (their mothers being sisters) that seals it for me.She was loving and friendly to both, having after all little close kin, and they both seem to have been fine people. She did not however in any way treat them like siblings, and surely she would have known if they were. It is argued that to show that she thought them her siblings would have called her own legitimacy into question, as canon law would have prohibited her father from marrying her mother if he had previously had carnal knowledge of her mother's sister. That argument overlooks the fact that Elizabeth was illegitimate, her parents' marriage having been declared invalid and her bastardy confirmed by statute. She had 45 years in which to amend that status and never troubled to, so it cannot have overly concerned her.My overall conclusion is that while it is possible of course that either or both of the Carey siblings were children of Henry VIII, the case for it seems to be largely composed of supposition and wishful thinking. Except in the unlikely event of new and more conclusive evidence emerging, I will continue to regard the two Careys as just that, rather than secret Tudors.§ Him I was not sure about; the path for the descent I knew of was not present, I thought, in such mainstream royal ancestry as he has, but there might be a descent through his Scottish aristocratic ancestry, and likely would be through his descents from French nobility. Since I would have to look into the Scottish ancestry when preparing the note for 1492 (in order to establish descent from Henry VII of England and James IV of Scotland, which I knew the Prince did not have through his royal ancestry but I thought almost surely would from his Scottish descents), I left things there for the time being. When I did that work I found what I wanted, and also found the desired descent from Jeanne d’Angoulême. I therefore recorded all that in the next post on this thread, rather than in the 1492 thread to which it now seems to far more directly relate. Then, when working on the 1453 note, I found that I was wrong, Albert II is descended from Jeanne d’Angoulême via his mainstream royal blood! This is explained, and shown, in the penultimate paragraph of the first part of that note. And then back to 1492, while revising that note I found that the particular ancestry of hers, explained above, which made me so interested in Jeanne d’Angoulême in the first place came to all ten current sovereigns by another route entirely (see the note below), so the whole excursion had been quite unnecessary.Oh well, descent from her is still a collateral descent from a 1517 sovereign to all those of the present day, and though available by more routes than I had realised the ancestry of hers which had been the point of the whole exercise is still, I believe, worth recording, in fact I find it fascinating. The particular route from Jeanne shown in the next post is also interesting, I feel, even if (as it turned out) doubly redundant, so I have left the post alone, partly for that reason and partly as a monument to the pitfalls awaiting amateurs of genealogy.** Descent from both Olivier V de Clisson and Jeanne de Flandre comes to René I of Rohan by other routes, bypassing Jeanne d’Angoulême. In the 1492 note (first part, final two paragraphs), in the process of establishing Catherine of Navarre as a general ancestor of today’s sovereigns I did the same for René I, her son-in-law, then (actually while enquiring into the posterity of Alfonso V of Aragón) had a bad thought about the House of Rohan’s Breton roots and the likelihood of the descents that had so interested me here coming to him also in other ways – a likelihood which a quick look turned into certainty.

While looking at the posterities of 1492 sovereigns, in preparation for posting that chart later on today, I had to investigate the Scottish ancestry of the Prince of Monaco to ascertain descent from James IV of Scotland and Henry VII of England. All other current sovereigns descend from James I and VI of England and Scotland, taking care of both his predecessors, but not the Prince. However, although as mentioned in the first footnote above I had previously checked his Scottish ancestry looking for a descent from illegitimate children of James V without success, I could not believe that he would also lack descent from the illegitimate progeny of James IV, and indeed I have found a large number of such descents. I would have given up with one, but Henry VII remained to be settled. It seemed highly likely that there would be a descent from his younger daughter Mary; such descents are mainly found in the English aristocracy, from which the Dukes of Hamilton, Albert II's Scottish forebears, regularly married. In fact, though, it was a Scottish noblewoman, Lady Harriet Stewart, wife of the 9th Duke of Hamilton, who brought a descent from Henry VII to the Princes of Monaco from Louis II on. And with it a descent from Jeanne d’Angoulême, vindicating the Scottish route mentioned in the fourth footnote to the previous post.

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